Urban farming advocate and recording artist Taja Sevelle works on a garden in Detroit at the corner of Linwood and Gladstone May 26. / MANDI WRIGHT/Detroit Free Press

Detroit Free Press Business Writer

Urban farming advocate and recording artist Taja Sevelle works on a garden in Detroit at the corner of Linwood and Gladstone Thursday May 26, 2011. 'I want to turn Motown into Growtown' said Sevelle. MANDI WRIGHT/Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press

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Music-savvy readers may know Taja Sevelle best as a singer who worked with Prince and other artists. But beginning in 2005, she turned her concern with feeding the needy into a nonprofit called Urban Farming, which started in Detroit but is now a worldwide organization that encourages and supports community gardeners. The Free Press talked to Sevelle about building the organization. Questions and answers were edited for brevity and clarity.

Tell us about the beginnings of Urban Farming.

We started in 2005 in Detroit with three gardens and a pamphlet. Now we have more than 61,000 gardens that are registered with Urban Farming as part of the global food chain in more than 20 countries around the world.

How’d you do that?

It’s a lot of work. It’s a long story. But in general, you first have to clarify your mission statement, get the 501(c)(3) status, assemble a board of directors. We just really started rolling up our sleeves and working immediately. So we hit the ground running, sort of like the Nike commercial, just do it.

How do you balance a music career with nonprofit work?

I put my music career on the back burner to get this off the ground. I literally for the first 4½, 5 years put in 17-hour days. And it was every day. For me during that time of my life, weekends and holidays just got in my way. I wanted to just keep working every day. And that’s what I did. I made on average 100 to 150 phone calls every single day, all around the country and around the world to garner support for this mission.

Once it started hitting the tipping point, it became easier for me to step back a little and start putting my music career back on the front burner. That’s where I’m at now, and it’s really wonderful. Urban Farming is now successful in phase two of our mission. We’re encouraging hundreds of millions of people around the world to plant their own food.

Your work has been featured on CNN, the BBC, NPR, even “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” and “Good Morning America.”

That was a real tipping point not only for our organization but for gardeners everywhere and the movement globally. It’s become a trend. Everybody really started jumping on board.

How did you recruit the gardeners?

Once we started letting people know what the mission was all about, people just sort of volunteer and line up to help. I started out with just one person in the beginning and then it became two and three and we started to assemble a core team in Detroit that has been with us this whole time and very passionate about the mission.